Place to find helpful snippets of code to use in making your own games.

Sunday, September 18, 2016

Green Algae: Dev Update pathfinding

Finding the way

So just implemented a brute-force pathfinding method implementing a basic Flood-Fill (Breadth first search) algorithm. It's wasteful but effective. I plan to improve the pathfinding method to a more practical implementation for use in other areas. It's enough to get started integrating it more abstractly into the basic game world for easier use when characters want to move around. It was pretty fun seeing it work.

Other work

On top of the pathfinding, I reworked the map generation which is hopefully more efficient, reliable, and is making more evenly distributed islands. If you noticed from previous screenshots the islands were all generating on an angle moving to the top-left while generating. Was due to the infamous off by one error, though I was kind of digging the realistic nature of some of the island strips. Perhaps that could be a useful generation permutation in the future.

Where's the build?

I wish I had something playable that you could check out but it's just too rough right now. And I do not have any process for putting together a public release yet. But things are moving along getting some basic AI and decision making system set up is probably my number one priority. Once I have a solid extendable task based system for controlling units assignments it will open the gates to adding all kinds of content. Right now it's just reworking and molding the current code into a more effective structure.

Suggestions welcome

By the way the game concept is very much flexible at this point in time. Not much at all has been solidified. That being said, I am completely open to suggestions or ideas that you may have to help guide some of the gameplay.

Comments to any update post or to the Project Page are strongly encouraged.

P.S. You can find updates to the Roadmap on the project page. I'll get a description of the game there too since there is no dev version yet.